There was a small house that sat, sleepy-eyed and tidy, on the sweeping hill that stood guard over the river.
In that house, it was said, lived a young woman; Sen, she'd said her name was.
The villagers whispered about her when they glanced up at the long grasses that brushed the sides of her clean white house; they murmured like the river that rushed through brambles and bedrock, smoothing stone and wiping the world clean with its words.
When her family came to visit, the villagers always pointed them in the same direction; down, towards the river bank, where Sen usually knelt, though her family called her something else. She trailed her fingers through the rippling clarity, let water droplets freckle her face and arms.
Sometimes, she could be heard murmuring to the water, as if it could hear her, could decipher the music she breathed, the spun gold of the stories she spoke. Sometimes, she simply repeated a name, though no one knew who the name belonged to.
When she wasn't by the river, she was writing, filling journals and shelves and the air with unimaginable lands, full of bath-houses and dragons and a train that sped on and on into nothing. It was said that she was in truth a published, quite successful author, but she kept to herself, so the only proof anyone had were her books, which appeared in the stores and shops every year.
When Sen came down to the village, everybody whispered that her dark eyes were wide, haunted by spirits and impossibilities and a dragon. They said that she always seemed to be missing something, looking for something, some part of her that had fled; perhaps she sought a far-off land that she could not reach, and wondered if it had all been some fanciful dream.
Whatever it was she was looking for, she never found it.